Solo Media Forums

[Anonymous]

It's no secret that I've long been fond of Baen Books and what they've been doing for electronic publishing. By publishing all of their new releases in inexpensive, DRM-free open-format ebooks, I feel that they've been doing a great thing for promoting the usefulness of ebooks, and promoting general readership of science fiction while they were at it. And I'm certainly not the only WOYP columnist to feel this way.

But Baen has not been content to rest on their laurels. In just a couple of months, they'll be launching a new science-fiction e-zine called Jim Baen's Universe. Planned to come out six times yearly, it will feature stories from both established writers and newcomers, and offer significantly better payment rates than other SF 'zines are able to offer today. Jim Baen and Eric Flint describe it in terns that border on hyperbole as possibly being the last chance to save written science-fiction from becoming irrelevant as its primary audience gets older and the young readers are attracted to computer games and movies and other diversions instead. I don't know if I'd go quite that far, but it does look like an interesting opportunity for new writers—part of each magazine is explicitly set aside for stories from as-yet-unpublished new talent.

But a more exciting development has taken place in the last couple of weeks: Tor Books, a substantially larger and broader publisher of science fiction and fantasy than Baen, has taken notice of Baen's success. Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Tor's senior editor and manager of their SF line, has said:

[Tibbarerew]

To me that's very exciting. The acceptance of ebooks by mainstream publishers like TOR could mean a lot for ebooks in general. The most important part of this though is making ebooks affordable. Far too many publishers price ebooks outside the realm of sanity in what I like to call the "What the hell were they thinking?" zone.
_________________
Josh Curry,

Defender of the Known Universe

[Anonymous]

It's great to read you again, Chris. This news is huge! I am only one peon (read: customer), and so my dollars do not amount to much. However, I can say that relative to my income, I have spent a significant fraction of it on e-books. These were dollars that usually would go elsewhere: I have no shelf space, so I tend to borrow books from the library. Now, with e-books, I store them all on my PDA. Don't these publishers realize that I'm just dying to give them my money? And to think that Tor will publish unencrypted versions of their books! The only downside: why impose an artificial release cycle, especially on backlists?

Here's an idea: publishers should continually release backlists into digimedia. However, keep it hush hush. It shouldn't be apparent until I go looking for an author or a title that it is present. The hoopla can be lavished on new books and new authors, without backlists damaging sales of the new releases. Think infrastructure when we talk about backlists.

Boy, do I sound like a person who loves reading, and not someone who's interested in making money in publishing.

mcc

[Anonymous]

And with rather interesting timing, Slashdot posts a story called Ebooks: What's Holding You Back?